Courtesy & Emeritus Faculty

Jay Boda joined the faculty of the John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art as Associate Director of Academic Affairs and Collections in January 2022. Dr. Boda’s research interests include visitor-centered curation, museum education, transmedia storytelling, reflective judgement, and museum professional development. He supervises the Ringling’s academic programs and in-residence student interns enrolled in the Museums and Cultural Heritage Studies (MCHS) and Edu-curation (EC) programs while teaching two graduate seminars for the Department of Art History: The Museum Object (ARH 5838) and Public Programs (ARH 5806). 

Dr. Boda also oversees the Ringling’s Archives, Collections, Education, and Library departments.A two-time Samuel H. Kress Foundation Scholar recipient, Dr. Boda conducted a grant-funded research project for the International Council of Museums (ICOM) Committee for University Museums and Collections (UMAC). He studied education and career trends among global higher education professionals. His research will be published in the forthcoming edited book, Professionalising Museum Work in Higher Education: A Global Approach — editors, Dr. Marta Lorenço and Dr. Darko Babic. Dr. Boda has taught graduate courses for FSU’s Department of Art Education (Leading the Arts Organization, Museum Education, and Visitor Studies) and undergraduate courses for the University South Florida, St. Petersburg (Cultural Studies and Pop Art: Transmedia Storytelling, Film and Culture, and Introduction to English Literature).

Dr. Boda graduated with his Ph.D. from FSU’s Museum Education and Visitor-Centered Curation program in 2020. He studied readers theatre pedagogy as a method to assess and foster reflective judgement development in museum professionals dealing with contentious topics. He’s preparing a book for cultural organizations based on his dissertation. He’s presented research internationally including the 50th anniversary conference celebrating the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, England. In addition to his museum and higher education background, Dr. Boda holds an MFA in screenwriting (2015) from FSU’s College of Motion Picture Arts and completed FSU’s Theatre Academy London writing program. The thesis film he wrote, Frankenstein’s Light, earned multiple awards during its festival season including Best Film from the Directors Guild of America in 2015.

In 2011, Dr. Boda began his museum career as a volunteer docent with the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg after being inspired by an undergraduate art history elective. In 2018, he established the Director of Education and Interpretation role at the Imagine Museum in St. Petersburg. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, he worked with the U.S. Navy Seabee Museum and Archives as an Education and Outreach Specialist in Port Hueneme, California.

Before his museum career, Dr. Boda honorably retired from the U.S. Air Force as a Master Sergeant after a distinguished 20-year active duty career in the information technology field. He’s lived throughout Europe and the Middle East during several military assignments — including a combat tour in Iraq. As a first-generation college graduate, Dr. Boda earned FSU’s prestigious Emeritus Alumni Veteran Academic Excellence Award and credits the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill for the life-changing opportunities offered through higher education.

Richard K. Emmerson is Dean Emeritus of the School of Liberal Arts at Manhattan College and former Professor and Chair of Art History at Florida State University. He has served as Deputy Director of Fellowships at the National Endowment for the Humanities and as Executive Director of the Medieval Academy of America, and has edited Speculum, Studies in Iconography, and Traditio. A Fellow of the Medieval Academy, he received the Medieval Academy Award for Excellence in Teaching Medieval Studies in 2009.

Dr. Emmerson’s research focuses on medieval apocalypticism and its representation in art, drama, and visionary poetry. He has published nine books, including Antichrist in the Middle Ages: A Study of Medieval Apocalypticism, Art, and Literature (1981), The Apocalyptic Imagination in Medieval Literature (1992, with Ronald B. Herzman), and The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (1993, with Bernard McGinn). He has authored more than fifty articles, many studying word-image relationships in medieval illustrated manuscripts. Recent essays include “On the Threshold of the Last Days: Negotiating Image and Word in the Apocalypse of Jean de Berry,” in Exploring the Threshold of Medieval Visual Culture (2012); “Visualizing the Visionary: John in his Apocalypse,” in Looking Beyond: Visions, Dreams and Insights in Medieval Art and Thought (2010); “Framing the Apocalypse: The Performance of John’s Life in the Trinity Apocalypse,” in Visualizing Medieval Performance (2008); “Visualizing the Vernacular: Middle English in Early Fourteenth-Century Bilingual and Trilingual Manuscript Illustrations,” in Studies in Manuscript Illumination: A Tribute to Lucy Freeman Sandler (2008); “A ‘Large Order of the Whole’: Intertextuality and Interpictoriality in the Hours of Isabella Stuart,” Studies in Iconography (2007); and “The Representation of Antichrist in Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias: Image, Word, Commentary, and Visionary Experience,” Gesta (2002).

Dr. Emmerson’s book studying the seven-hundred year history of medieval Apocalypse manuscripts, Apocalypse Illuminated: The Visual Exegesis of Revelation in Medieval Manuscripts, was published by Pennsylvania State University Press in 2018. His commentary on the Apocalypse of Jean, duc de Berry, an illustrated manuscript held by the Pierpont Morgan Library, was published in 2020 by Mueller und Schindler. In 2021 his commentary on another Apocalypse manuscript, British Library Additional 38121, was published by Moleiro as The Picture Book Life of St. John and the Apocalypse. His colleagues, students, and friends have recently published a volume of essays in his honor as Tributes to Richard K. Emmerson: Crossing Medieval Disciplines (Brepols, 2021).

Dr. Emmerson regularly offers the online undergraduate course IDS 2678-0001–Apocalypse: The End of the World in the Arts, which studies how people have depicted the end of the world, from biblical times to nuclear war and the zombie apocalypse.

Completed Dissertations

Britt Hunter (Co-chair): “The Wellcome Apocalypse: Innovating Pictorial Traditions in the Ordinatio of a Late Medieval Multi-Text Manuscript”
Deirdre Carter: “Art, History, and the Creation of Monastic Identity at Late Medieval St. Albans Abbey.” (Co-chair)
Sarah Andyshak: “Christ and Exegesis: Visual Interpretation in the Moralized Bibles, Circa 1225-1235.” (Co-chair)
Karlyn Griffith: “Antichrist, Eschatology, and Romance in the Illustrated Harley Apocalypse, Sibylle Tiburtine, and the Tournoiement Antécrist (MSS Harley 4972 and Douce 308).” (Co-chair)

Jack Freiberg (PhD, New York University, Institute of Fine Arts) retired in August, 2021, after serving for twenty-nine years as a faculty member in the Department of Art History and fifteen years (2003–2018) as associate dean of the College of Fine Arts. His research and publications focus on the art and architecture of Renaissance Rome. He has been awarded fellowships by the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, the American Academy in Rome, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. His most recent book, Bramante’s Tempietto, The Roman Renaissance and the Spanish Crown, was published in 2014 by Cambridge University Press. 

Completed Dissertations

Tanja L. Jones, “The Renaissance Portrait Medal and the Court Context: On the Origins and Political Function of Pisanello’s Invention.”
Jillian Curry Robbins, “The Art of History: Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita and the Visual Arts of the Early Italian Renaissance.”
Amy Wright, “The Bible of Borso d’Este: Christian Piety and Political Rhetoric in Quattrocento Ferrara.”
Timothy B. Smith, “Alberto Aringhieri and the Chapel of Saint John the Baptist: Patronage, Politics, and the Cult of Relics in Renaissance Siena.”
Steve B. Choate, “Devotion and Narrative Within the Tradition of the ‘Croce Dipinta.’”
Kurt J. Sundstrom, “The Chiostro Grande of Monte Oliveto Maggiore and the Olivetan Reform Movement.”
List of FSU Art History dissertations

Selected Publications

Links to publications are also available on Dr. Freiberg’s academia.edu page.

Bramante’s Tempietto, the Roman
Renaissance, and the Spanish Crown (Cambridge University Press, 2014). (Prologue) (Reviews)

The Lateran in 1600: Christian Concord in Counter-Reformation Rome (Cambridge University Press, 1995). (Introduction)

“Pope Gregory XIII, Jurist,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 54 (2009): 41-60.

“Verrocchio’s Putto and Medici Love,” in Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque: A Cat’s Cradle for Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, edited by David A. Levine and Jack Freiberg (New York: Italica Press, 2009): 83-100.

“Bramante’s Tempietto and the Spanish Crown,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 50 (2005): 151-205.

“Vasari’s Bramante and the Renaissance of Architecture in Rome,” in Reading Vasari, edited by Anne B. Barriault, Andrew Ladis, Norman E. Land, Jeryldene M. Wood (London: Philip Wilson and Athens, GA: The Georgia Museum of Art, 2005): 132-146.

Roald Nasgaard (PhD, New York University, Institute of Fine Arts) was Professor of Art History and Chair of the Art Department at Florida State University from 1995 to 2006. His teaching career began at the University of Guelph in 1971. In the years between, before returning to academia, he had a long and distinguished museum career. From 1975 to 1978 he served as Curator of Contemporary Art and then, until 1993, as Chief Curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Among the many exhibition catalogues he authored are Yves Gaucher: A Fifteen-Year Perspective (1979); The Mystic North: Symbolist Landscape Painting in Northern Europe and North America, 1890-1940 (1984); Gerhard Richter: Paintings (1988); and Pleasures of Sight and States of Being: Radical Abstract Painting Since 1990 (2001). He has held several Canada Council fellowships and grants as well as a Research Fellowship at the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives and a Cornerstone (AHPEG) Grant. He won an OAAG Curatorial Writing Award in 1991 for his essay in Individualités: 14 Contemporary Artists from France. His Abstract Painting in Canada: A History was published in August 2007. His exhibition, The Urge to Abstraction, opened on September 15, 2007 at the Varley Art Gallery, Unionville Ont. His exhibition project for the Varley Art Gallery, Bourduas and the Automatistes, showed at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo in summer 2009.

Paula Gerson (PhD, Columbia University) served as chair of the FSU Department of Art History from 1996 to 2006. She also held appointments at Washington University, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, UNC, and Rutgers, and was the executive manager of the International Center of Medieval Art at the Cloisters in New York City. In addition to her scholarship in Romanesque and Gothic art and architecture, Dr. Gerson is an avid photographer who has exhibited work in solo and group shows. She retired in the spring of 2013, at which time she was honored with the title of Professor Emerita. In 2014 an all-day symposium in honor of Professor Gerson was held at Columbia University, supported by the Columbia Department of Art History and Archaeology; the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University; Young Harris College; and Prof. Gerson’s students, friends and colleagues.

Patricia Rose (PhD, Columbia University) retired in 2002 after teaching art history at Florida State University for 30 years and serving as chair of the Department of Art History for 17 of those years. During her time at FSU, she brought together an outstanding faculty, handled the demands of her position with unwavering grace, patience and humor, and treated generations of students with dedication and respect. The faculty, students and staff of the department and of the College showed their affection for Dr. Rose with a retirement celebration in April, 2002, and she was named Professor Emerita. She also made a generous donation to the department that year of her extensive collection of art books, which became the foundation of the Rose Library. In retirement, Pat enjoyed travel and FSU basketball, visiting with her many friends and assisting neighbors in her community, and spending as much time as possible playing with her grand-niece and -nephews. She passed away on August 27, 2020. In recognition of Dr. Rose’s true passion – the students – her family created the Patricia Rose Fund in Art History, in support of the library she helped to found and the graduate students who work there. Read more about Pat Rose.

Lauren S. Weingarden (PhD, University of Chicago) was a professor of Art History at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, United States, from 1983 to 2020.  Dr. Weingarden specializes in modern and contemporary art, architecture, critical theory, and word-and-image studies. She is the author of several books and articles on the late nineteenth-century American architect Louis H. Sullivan. She has published and presented extensively in the United States and internationally. Her single-authored books include Louis H. Sullivan: The Banks (MIT Press, 1987), Louis H. Sullivan: A System of Architectural Ornament (Wasmuth and The Art Institute of Chicago, 1990), and Louis H. Sullivan and a 19th–Century Poetics of Naturalized Architecture (Ashgate, 2009).